Gesture detection is becoming more and more important in nowadays world, since the detection of gestures enables a user to operate an IT-system, e.g. desktop computers, notebooks, PDAs, smart phones, game consoles, or others, based on simple and even natural human gestures without the need of using particular input devices like keyboards, trackballs, game controllers or others. Such input devices require a user to adapt his behavior to the needs of the particular input device, which may even differ from input device to input device. Although methods for recognizing gestures and gesture detectors are already known in the art, gesture recognition is only rarely applied in exceptional cases. Particular hardware requirements and a high computational effort for performing gesture detection prevent gesture control from being widely applied.
One such system for detecting gestures is based on a stereoscopic camera and a microphone hardware accessory, which are specifically designed for gesture detection. This technique is for example known to end-users as Kinect for use together with Microsoft X-Box 360 gaming console. In general, users can control an IT-system using the above hardware by means of gestures, e.g. for control of an augmented reality environment. Drawbacks of this solution are its dependency on the dedicated hardware, which makes it difficult to apply gesture recognition to any IT-system. Also, the Kinect-technology requires a well defined environment, in which the user can assure that gestures will be recognized by the Kinect-system. Furthermore, a calibration of the Kinect-system is required for each user. Another drawback of the Kinect-system is that the computational effort for recognizing gestures is very high, which makes it impossible to use gesture recognition on IT-systems having a low computational performance, which generally applies to mobile devices. For example in video conference situations, participants, who are e.g. out of the office in public locations using public access means for participating in the video conference, are excluded from gesture recognition due to lack of suitable hardware and the unsuitability of the public environment for gesture recognition. The same applies for the use of gesture detection in a presentation system to control a presentation device.